Great! What you’ll also get with KNIME is this community forum which I have to say is beyond anything I’ve experienced elsewhere. Alteryx also had a responsive forum, but to me the KNIME community feels more like a family. I hope you are already getting that vibe!
Not only is there an active community of people willing to help, but you also get direct inputs and assistance from the KNIME team themselves, which is particularly impressive when you consider that if you are only using KNIME Analytics Platform (“KNIME AP” i.e. the desktop tool) you are not paying them anything!
The more you put into this forum, the more you’ll get out of it. If you have any problems or questions, then the main thing is asking things here in a clear and precise manner, and people here will do their best to assist.
Obviously some things take longer to help with than others, and occasionally there will be things that happen where it is really difficult to find a solution, or (uncommonly) there is a bug that will (hopefully) be fixed in a coming release. Nothing is ever perfect! I hope you decide to take the plunge. I’ve certainly not looked back, and I’ve introduced KNIME to others at my place of work (including those like me with a programming background) and they’ve not looked back either.
In terms of scheduled workflows, if you are looking for fully automated scheduling within a workflow, then that, along with a few other things such as version control, is part of the commercial KNIME Business Hub (formerly KNIME server) offering, so there could be a cost if you want that.
However, that’s not to say that people haven’t found ways to schedule the running of a workflows from Task Scheduler or other means.
Unlike the Alteryx that I knew, there is no “very limited free period” to try it before you decide. Play with it for free, use it for free, and choose to use the commercial offering when and if there is something more that you need from it.